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The Belgian Goodbye
The Belgian Goodbye “In only a day and a half on the beat, you two have done what no-one else has managed: you’ve closed the Fourth!” Fionn could see the open joy in Leslie Knope’s warm features and loved her a little for it. She was an educator at heart and it had hurt her every day she heard that air raid warning sound of the Fourth Floor doors admitting students for their strange quasi-incarceration. He had the weirdest thought for a moment, that he wanted to tell Apate this. Why it was her he thought of and not any of the others on the squad he couldn’t have told you. But contacting Apate was difficult even with the mirror she’d given him, so he put it from his mind. He left Leslie’s office and walked the halls towards the Chemistry Lab where he knew Jenny Swanson was working on a project lately. He arrived and was surprised to find her doodling in the sketchbook he’d got her for Christmas, instead of surrounded by beakers and various bubbling equipment, engaged in what he liked to call ‘alchemical witchcraft’. She looked up when he came in and gave him a strange bittersweet smile that warmed his heart and also gave it a kind of preliminary fracture. In this moment he realized how all the time they’d been spending together again lately, it was like she’d come back to him after he messed up with Barbie, like he’d had a second chance. “Is that blood?” Were the first words she said to him, brow furrowing as she saw some brownish stains on his shirt. “Uh, yeah, but don’t worry, it’s mine.” He said it with just the slightest touch of humour, but the extra message was clear: it wasn’t Simon Prince’s. She’d warned him to look out for Prince, a magnificent mortal but a mortal just the same. The casual tough-mindedness of the statement was typical of the man he was becoming, but he felt somehow for the first time that it wasn’t the right thing to say to Jenny. She looked relieved and glad though. “Well...do you... still have a change of clothes in your car?” She asked, in that semi-shy way she had when she was being provocative that absolutely killed him. He looked around her empty lab, marking that for further discussion later, looked back to her and grinned, extending an arm to link through. “I feel like you’re suggesting we should cut class, and when the smartest student in the school tells the most notorious student in the school she wants to cut class, he has no gentlemanly option but to say yes.” She took his arm, briefly laying her head on his shoulder, and they went to his car. She said -in her way, like it was no big deal but yet she almost stumbled on her words as she said it- that her parents were away for a couple of days at a convention for Smooth Jazz enthusiasts in Seattle. They both shuddered a little at the idea of Smooth Jazz, he put a tape in the deck and coughed slightly in mild embarrassment as Kenny Loggins announced that they were taking a ride into the Danger Zone. “It was uh, the soundtrack to a lot of me and Prince’s Clearwater Vice adventure,” Fionn explained slightly bashfully with a self effacing smile that made her reach out and hold his hand as they drove. When he glanced at her in his peripheral vision he saw her smiling the way she did sometimes when she found something he did really charming, but he also saw her eyes were wet. He let it go for now, and they sang along in agreement with Mr Loggins and in doing so realized how hard that was to do, so many of the lyrics were hard to make out and/or kind of bizarre. “Did he just say ‘you’ll never say hello to you until you get it on the red line overload?’ Did these lyrics come to him in a dream?” Fionn asked and she laughed, squeezing his hand. A little Loggins later they were pulling up to her house, Fionn digging in the back of the Hearse for his spare clothes. “Sonofa, I can’t find a spare shirt,” He muttered, then Jenny appeared beside him, kissing his cheek. “Um, you’ve got a Deadbeats t-shirt here, I wore it home after our Christmas Relapse,” She said softly. “Oh yeah,” He said, smiling at the memory, though something tugged at him, that sense he had sometimes that the rug was under his feet right now but there were strong hands gripping the corners and getting ready to pull. They went inside and she made coffee while he showered and changed into old jeans and a Deadbeats t-shirt, his clothes far more like what he’d worn when they first knew one another than his more recent suits from Hell’s finest tailor. He emerged and made his way to the kitchen but she wasn’t there, he followed the sound of Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love up to her room. She was singing softly along with the song as he came up “And if I only could, I’d make a deal with God, and I’d get him to swap our places...” He came in and she stopped, some tiny irony in her smile as she stood to meet him. She put her arms around his neck and kissed him, pressing her body to his. He put his arms around her and responded but she drew back after a few moments, tears in her eyes, a sad and warm and indescribably lovely smile on her face. She led him to the bed by the hand and they sat, side by side initially but then turned slightly towards each other. “I’ve been running over this again and again, how to say this to you. And I’m sorry, me saying that just prolongues it, makes you have to wonder what it is. I’m such an idiot. No, just... wait, I’ll say all this, okay?” Fionn nodded, letting her take his hand in hers. “It’s a few things. First, I got into MIT. My research in creating music purely through chemical reactions, it’s starting to work. They’ve offered me a full ride, full funding for my experiments. I’m gonna go.” Fionn’s mouth went dry, though he was proud of her too, and went to say so but she shook her head with that sad smile so he just let her keep talking. “I’m leaving this week, they’re so excited about my research that they don’t want to wait until the next academic year starts in September. It’s good that I’m going, Fionn. We’ve been spending all this time together lately, you see how easy it is, how good it feels? We’ve drifted back together, kind of, and it’s healed some wounds, hasn’t it. And that’s good.” She paused for a few moments, or perhaps it was more right to say she stopped. Fionn could see the words leave her, she didn’t quite know how to go on and he waited as she pieced it together. He tried not to think about what she was going to say, instead focusing on what she had already said, holding her hand, trying to silently communicate to her that he trusted her, whatever she had to say was okay. “I don’t know what it was like the first time you saw me, Fionn. I was unconscious, exhausted from all that madness that Phobos subjected us to down there. But I know what it was like the first time I saw you. You didn’t have all your scars yet then, just the one across your throat that gave you that voice I love. You were leaning over me on the forest floor and in your eyes as I woke I could see that you’d been there a while, afraid I wouldn’t wake up. And I could see you loved me. No uncertainty, no ambiguities, just absolute love. “I had felt so much fear in the weeks I was missing. None of the others woke up during it but I was awake nearly the whole time. Phobos was a horrible creature, I know you feel sorry for him because his parents put him where he was -and in hindsight I can kind of feel sorry for him too- but he would have destroyed my mind with fear if he could. I thought of my mother, Athena, goddess of Wisdom and Courage, and I kept it together as best I could, found that for all his power he couldn’t break me. “When I woke and saw you, I felt so safe. For the first time since he took me away, I felt safe. I didn’t know you yet then but I knew something about you. I could see your savage heart, the core of you that people don’t get to see because they think you’re so complicated. The core of you that will fight to your last drop of blood for those you love, so that if you give your last breath and die in such a battle, it will be a breath of joy if you can only know your loved ones are made safe. You didn’t say much to me that in that first meeting, you just said ‘It’s over, you’re safe,’ a few times until you knew it had sunk in. “I went to sleep that night hearing your voice, dreaming of your battle with Phobos. Some part of me was awake and I saw flashes of the fight: you getting knocked across the cave and coming right back at him, Barbie laying a hand on you to heal you to send you back into the fight, Cord putting an arrow in him and you finally beheading him, it all came to me in dreams over the next couple of days. It was strangely peaceful though, because I could hear your voice saying ‘It’s over, you’re safe,’ over the most frightening, most awful parts of the battle. “Do you remember you came to dinner with your mom and Bodhi and my folks sent you to come get me? I was so nervous and when you knocked on my bedroom door, I opened it and we looked at each other and I knew I loved you, knew I would always love you.” She started to cry then, he pulled her into his arms, unsure where this was going but already feeling the pain of loss. He kissed her forehead and she shook in his arms for a few minutes, holding herself to him like the mast of a ship in a storm. Finally she pulled back, scooting up the bed to put her back against the headboard, pulling his hand to have him sit beside her. “I’m sorry, I meant to get all this out in one go, you shouldn’t have to wait on me like this. The thing is - Do you know how intoxicating it was? That feeling I got whenever I pictured you, wings spread, sword in hand, coming to save me. You had killed a god to save me. And I knew in my heart it was for me. You cared about the others, you were glad to save them...but when you faced the God of Fear himself, walked into his lair, it was for me. That was my secret, something I told no-one. It wasn’t the battle, or how dangerous it was, it was knowing that you were there, ready to keep me safe forever. “I know that it was you in the house on Halloween, before I came to your party. I know you saved the children I was babysitting from Mister Stitches. I felt it, Fionn. I felt -knew- that you’d been near, watching over me, protecting me. “I know we broke each other’s hearts, that thing with Barbie, me breaking up with you and shutting you out. I know you changed a little then, but I want you to know I think you’re no less... noble. Noble, it’s a funny word but I feel okay using it about you. I know that you had flings with a lot of girls after me and I know your broken heart was a big part of why you did it. I don’t think any less of you for it, though I know you think less of yourself. “And lately... I know you haven’t been doing it. You haven’t been having those flings, haven’t been seeing all those girls, you’ve just been hanging out with me, having the occasional relapse. We have a lot of power over each other. Do you know how impossible it is for another boy to compete with you? Who could love me like you did, who could prove their love with their blood and sweat like you did? It’s like I said, it’s intoxicating. But... “My owl saw you fight Pecos Bill. I watched through her eyes, saw you and him fight for a long time. I saw how... how you executed him. Your savage heart, Fionn. I heard what you said to him. I knew Clearwater was so lucky you were here, I knew all of us children of the gods would have died at his hands if it weren’t for you. Do you know how much I feel I owe you? My life, Fionn, twice over. That I know of! It’s s0- like I said. Intoxicating. The way you make me feel safe, the way you look at me, and just... you. “It’s too much. My mother, you know of all the Olympians she’s the closest to mortals? She’s the one they built the most temples to, the one they trusted to care about them. I’m half-mortal Fionn, but I feel even more than that. I’m not made for battle, I can’t live like you can. I could never come with you and fight by your side. You are the Godkiller. Hera called you that as an insult but names have power and once she said the name it was right, as though it had always been so. They started using it like you were an upstart, a child who dared to murder one of their kind, but they missed the point. You can walk in any Pantheon’s hall, among any of the gods, and bring justice where nobody else can. And... you have to. I know it hurts you, I know you feel like a monster sometimes, but you have to be that man. You have to be that God. But I can’t watch it. “I’m terrified sometimes by how much I feel indebted to you, Fionn. You could ask me to stay and I’d give up MIT, I’d give up my research, because you have that much hold over me. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean you hold it over me, but you have the power just the same. Ah...I’m rambling. You know how I get. Do you understand what I’m talking about?” She didn’t pause for him to answer though, just kept talking and he let her. “I know I’m your first love Fionn. And you’re mine. There’s a bond between us unlike anything I’ll ever form with anyone else, but I can’t be your lover anymore. I have to live in the mortal world, it’s where I belong. You... I know you care for people, you hide it badly. At least from me anyway. You care for mortals but you’re not one of them. I am. So I’m going to MIT and I’m going to find a life away from the gods and you’re going to do what you must. You’ll come see me sometimes, like you said you’ll scare the crap out of my snooty college friends-” She sobbed suddenly and he put his arms around her, she held fast to him again. Her tears wet through his Deadbeats t-shirt. She cried for a while, there was something indefinably calming about it. Her tears were a catharsis but not just for her. She cried for them both. She looked up and he leaned to kiss her cheek, tasting her tears. She smiled, a little wobbly but ready to go on, this time speaking as she lay her head against his chest again. “You’ll come see me sometimes, maybe if we’re both single we’ll even spend a night together but we’ll know it’s not the beginning of anything and it’s not... it’s not holding on to anything. It’s not just me that has to go, Fionn. I have to let you go too. You and me, we get along so well and we’ve got so much chemistry and so much history, it’s just so easy to fall into again and again. And I don’t mean to belittle it by saying that, it’s powerful and beautiful between us. But we’ve each got to go to our own worlds, we’ve got to be among our own kind. “I’ve got to be with someone who lives in the mortal world and you’ve got to be with someone who can see your savage heart and not flinch. Jesus, please, please don’t hate me Fionn. Don’t hate me for saying that. I love you and I always will.” He’d listened quietly for a long time. The tape of Hounds of Love had repeated and they were almost through its second play. He knew everything she said was true, what’s more something she’d said about seeing his savage heart and not flinching, it had hurt like hell to hear but it had made such clear sense that he felt he was on the verge of some huge discovery, he just didn’t know what it was. “You’re right about it all, Jenny. You are meant for the mortal world, but you’re wise like Athena. They’re lucky to have you and you’ll do wonderful things for them and with them. We have to go our own ways and I bless you with all my heart as you go yours.” She raised herself to kiss him then, her hands in his hair, her tears still flowing, wetting his face. They spend the morning, the afternoon, the night together as lovers one last time.